We begin today with John Cassidy of The New Yorker and his postscript to the debt ceiling debate/bill/law and what it says about our politics of today.
Biden’s world view, which he has stuck to doggedly since launching his Presidential candidacy, in 2019, is that, even as full-scale partisan warfare rages on social media and cable news, there are still enough reasonable people in Congress, and enough moderate voters in the country, who can be mobilized to keep the show on the road, and even get some constructive things done, such as subsidizing green energy and reducing the cost of insulin for seniors. (The debt-ceiling agreement preserved both of these policies.) Inside the 2020 Biden campaign, this argument got reduced to the mantra “Twitter isn’t real life.” But, to the President himself, fostering bipartisanship is a personal mission. “No matter how tough our politics gets, we need to see each other not as adversaries but as fellow-Americans,” he said in his television address. “Treat each other with dignity and respect. To join forces as Americans, to stop shouting, lower the temperature, and work together to pursue progress, secure prosperity, and keep the promise of America for everybody.”
Admirable sentiments. But the fact remains that the House Republicans recklessly manufactured a crisis to pursue their political ends and ended up achieving some of them. After vowing for months not to negotiate about the debt ceiling, the White House was forced to reverse course and make a series of concessions to reach a deal. As I argued last week, the agreement could have been a lot worse, but the process by which it was reached—extortion, basically—supported Fitch’s argument for staying on high alert, namely that “there has been a steady deterioration in governance over the last 15 years.” […]
If the Republicans return to power, they are likely to make the fiscal outlook considerably worse by cutting taxes again, especially taxes on the rich, which is what they did during the Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump administrations. When Republicans are out of office, they talk about reducing the deficit; when they have power, they introduce policies that increase it. This is a long-standing pattern, and there’s no compelling reason to assume that it will change soon. Fitch failed to mention this ongoing threat to fiscal stability, but it’s a key feature of the deterioration in U.S.-government finances over the past forty years, and the ratings agencies should be willing to point this out. Financial irresponsibility in Washington isn’t a symmetrical phenomenon.